A lot.

The forecast was for a trace to 2″ in higher elevations. Hah!

It started snowing around 10:00 AM, but nothing was sticking because temps weren’t below freezing. It started to stick around 11:00, but not much, and the temperatures were still above freezing. Many of us didn’t think that much about it because…oh, I don’t know. Because we all count on weather forecasts to be accurate now. Because whenever we all get excited about possible snow, it almost never materializes. Because it was sticking to some things, but the roads were still clear. Because last week was false spring in northwest Oregon, and we’ve collectively decided that the time for real winter has passed.

Some schools closed early, but many did not because it wasn’t supposed to freeze until later, after the snow was supposed to stop falling.

Many, many people ended up on the road around 3:30, when, instead of tapering off, the snow started falling harder and the temperature dropped. People like Cane and me, who had to go feed his daughter’s cat. We could have left to feed the cat earlier in the day, when his school closed at noon, but instead we took a nap. Because we were tired. Because we knew we could go later. Because there wasn’t that much snow on the road and it would probably melt. Because the weather was not a big deal.

Hah!

Once in the car, we quickly realized our folly.

About a third of the way there we realized that even if we could get to said cat, we might not be able to get back home. That realization took us a bit of time to get to because denial is a strong persuader, and it’s hard to let go of our ideas about what we can and can’t control and how things are supposed to be. But finally, reluctantly, we admitted that the cat could live until we could get there the next day, but we might be in some trouble if we didn’t turn around. We ducked into a side street and went around the block to get ourselves going in the opposite direction on the street pictured above. We then moved two car lengths in 20 minutes. And while we were idling and trying to make a plan, we had the further realization that all of the routes home we might take included a slope of one kind or another.

We needed to bail on the whole enterprise of driving.

We took the first turn onto a side street that we could, and we drove as far in the direction of our house as we could before hitting another clogged street or hill. Then, we parked our car on the side of the road, locked it, and began a nearly 2 mile walk to our house, with snow blowing in our faces in below-freezing temperatures.

Before we left the house, I’d grabbed a pair of thin, knit gloves I use for skating, but not my warm ski gloves. “It’s not like the horse is going to die and we’re going to have to get there on foot,” I’d joked, “but I feel like I should have something if we’re going out in bad weather.” I was sure I wouldn’t need them.

Hah!

We walked a mile. We took our glasses off because we realized we could see better without them. The world felt a little apocalyptic.

We stopped at a bar to dry off and warm up because our pants and my silly gloves were soaking wet and my thighs had gone numb. Cane got his glasses out, and the frame snapped in two. We ordered a drink.

From the news playing on big screens, we learned that another 4-6″ was now expected to fall through the night. We realized we’d best get moving. So we did. More blowing snow. More trudging. More numb thighs and cold hands. And then we finally got home, around 6:30.

It kept snowing. And snowing. And snowing.

But our power stayed on, and we had food, and it was pretty, and we felt lucky.

It turned out to be the second-biggest snowfall that Portland’s ever recorded. (The #1 spot goes to a snow in 1943.) Ten inches wouldn’t be a very big deal in a lot of places, but it is here, where we rarely see that kind of accumulation. It took some guy on Reddit more than 12 hours to get home, and the news reported 6 hour commutes for many. Some people on interstate roadways walked away from their cars. It was a big deal because weren’t ready for it, we have little experience with it, and–because this kind of thing is rare–we don’t have a lot of infrastructure in place for it.

So much depends upon what you’re prepared for, doesn’t it?

The next day we took the bus to the cat. Had the whole thing to ourselves.

As I finish these words, we’re in the ugly stage of snow. It’s raining, and the view out my window is full of chunky, dirty-gray sludge. We should soon be back to our region’s normal. I’m going to miss our brief respite from normal. The night we walked home, we passed a sloping street with a long back-up of cars. Several people who lived along that street were out with snow shovels, helping people get their cars unstuck. Stories of good samaritans made the news. On Friday, the streets were quiet in the way they were during the early days of the pandemic. The few of us who were out smiled at each other more than we usually do. Our Thursday night was challenging, but now we’ve got a good story we’ll tell each other when snow falls in the future. It’s been a quiet weekend of leftovers and movies and puzzling. A big part of me hates to see it end.

Still, I know other good things are on the way, and it will always be true that change is the only constant.

Sometimes, my Facebook feed feels like a parade of dead parents. So many people I know are living through the same stage of life I am, and this is where we are: the age of our untethering.

A good friend from college recently lost her father, suddenly, and although–I guess?–none of us should be surprised, it was still surprising. I haven’t yet crossed over to the island so many of my old friends now inhabit, and I always feel at a loss for words when I see them climbing onto that terrible shore. What can I call across to them that that will be helpful and true? What do I know of where they are, or of what life now means to them? When I imagine the journey ahead of me, my own foundation collapsing and throwing me into that same sea…well, I don’t. Imagine it. Not for long, anyway.

My friend, who is also managing some other challenges typical for those our age, has been much on my mind. One dreary day this week, as I pulled into a grocery store parking lot, Katrina and the Waves’s “Walking on Sunshine” came on the radio:

What a frothy confection of a song! It transported me to 1985, the year Kim and I, a pair of coltish young women all lanky and clumsily beautiful, became friends. I remembered a particular afternoon in our sorority’s sun-filled living room, feeling good with her in a place I often felt bad, laughing at that song, at where we were, at how it felt to be everything we were on a rare warm northwest spring day. Everyone around us was blonde and light, with faces turned toward futures I couldn’t imagine as anything other than bright. Nearly 40 years later, sitting in my car in the parking lot of a dismal grocery store on a gray January day, the song made me smile, the way it always did then and always has since. It made me feel good to think of us as we once were, so many of our dramas then as silly-serious as the music, with our biggest mistakes not yet made and our deepest pains not yet felt.

Weren’t we lucky, once?

I want to say that we had no idea how good we had it, but that’s too easy and not quite true. Filling out an intake form recently, I wrote that I am, right now, the best I’ve ever been. And I am. That is true. Sure, I would love to still have my 20-year-old body–and so many of the things and people and places and opportunities I’ve had and lost since then–but not the fears and worries and nearly unbearable weight of impending choices my younger self struggled to carry.

Yes, we had so much. Yes, we had it all ahead of us. Yes, there is something wonderful about a mostly blank slate. And also: It was terrifying and hard and confusing because there was so much we didn’t know and so much pressure to get it All Right. We didn’t know, then, that all right was a fantasy, a myth. That we would never be entirely OK, no matter which choices we did and didn’t make. That simply choosing right would not prevent wounds or heal the ones we didn’t even know, yet, that we had. That even the golden ones among us would suffer. That our lives would always be as they were and had always been, a terrible, gorgeous mix.

Although I will, in the face of another’s grief, always fear saying the wrong thing, or saying the right thing the wrong way, I have learned that it is generally better to say something than nothing. So I sent the song to my friend with a few bumbling words, even as I worried that they might land wrong. That she might wonder what the hell I was thinking, would not understand what I was trying to offer or say. That I would make her feel even more sad than she already does.

But what she wrote back to me was, “I can’t express how much I LOVE this.”

I don’t know how she feels–how any of my friends on that shore I’m heading for truly feel–but I know that the more I lose, the more I love what I’ve had, and the more I realize what a gift it can be to have something good to feel nostalgic and heartbroken with, even if it is only a soft song that lets us forget, for a few moments, all the hard “yes, ands” we all live with, no matter our age.

What’s making me cry this week:

I’ve written here about being a school librarian, but I’ve never said much about the other role I played for the last third of my career as an educator: instructional coach. In short, my job was to support teachers in improving their instructional practice. My speciality was literacy, and I was often leading training sessions to teach teachers how to implement an instructional framework my district had committed to that I came to believe wholeheartedly in.

My faith was based in both research studies showing the framework’s effectiveness and in seeing how it transformed teaching and learning for those teachers I worked with who implemented it fully. For a very few teachers, I watched teaching become more joyful, less arduous, and more effective.

Why only a very few? you might be wondering. Well, because very few were willing/able to implement it fully. Many were frustrated and burned out by the many, many systemic inadequacies they worked within. Many had tried many, many things already that had promised to make things better, only to be disappointed when they did not, in fact, make things better. What I was asking them to do was not easy, and most of us won’t voluntarily do hard things if we don’t have faith or hope that doing them will make things better.

“I already do that,” they’d say to me. (No, they didn’t really. They did parts, or they did things that were “that” superficially, but not in the ways that mattered most. But they weren’t really doing it.)

“It won’t work because ______ (fill in with any number of things that are beyond a teacher’s control to fix or change),” they’d say. They believed that if someone else could just fix those things (poor attendance, kids’ home lives, lack of resources, etc.), the ways in which they were teaching would be just fine and they wouldn’t need to change what they were doing.

I was often frustrated and bewildered by their responses. There I was, offering a way that was in their control to make their teaching lives better–and improve their students’ learning. True, it would require them to teach in some radically different ways. It would require the shifting of some long-held paradigms. It would mean bucking tradition and giving up some things that they valued. But the current ways weren’t really working! (Everyone admitted that.) And they were unsustainable!

“What do you really have to lose if it doesn’t go well?” I’d ask. “Just try,” I’d implore.

Most did not. I could not understand the resistance I faced when I was offering tools of empowerment. So many people I talked with were so frustrated because they felt powerless. “The great thing is that you have the power to make things better,” I’d say. “And the hard thing is that you have the power to make things better.” It’s hard because if we have the power to make a change, we are the ones who have to make it happen. We are the ones who have to change. We can’t wait for someone else to do things to improve the situation.

This fall, as a student in a 7-week pain management course, and in subsequent experiences that have grown out of that one, I’ve come to a greater understanding of that resistance.

I hated my pain management course. I dreaded Thursday mornings, when I’d have to sit in a 2-hour Zoom meeting and listen to excessively chirpy and annoyingly positive facilitators tell me that I had the power to reduce my pain and make my life better.

I was pretty sure that those facilitators did not know chronic pain the way my fellow participants and I know chronic pain. They were not living it as we were. (I actually don’t know if that’s true. They might have been.)

They shared a poem that basically said it was our responsibility to change the course of our journey with pain, and the implication that it was my choices creating my pain (and therefore my fault) pissed me off so much I said in a session that I thought the poem was ableist and insulting and wondered if perhaps they could find something that gave a similar message about empowerment without the victim-blaming. (Yep, I was that person.)

I, and, it became clear, all of my fellow course participants, had already done and tried so many of the things they were “teaching” us to do. And yet, there we all were, still in pain that was negatively impacting our lives. That pissed me off, too.

In one session, I got extra pissed off because life circumstances for most people make the remedies they were suggesting impossible to implement. Many of the things suggested would not have been possible for me to do in my life when I was working full-time and single-parenting my kids. Since September, I have told others that my new job is getting a handle on my health and pursuing remedies to the various maladies that have plagued me for 3 decades or more, and I haven’t been joking. It has felt like a full-time job, doing All The Things (which I won’t list here).

And, man, if I don’t now get where all those teachers who didn’t want my Kool-Aid were coming from. I was just as burned out from years of struggle with my health and the healthcare system as many of them were from years of struggle with their teaching practice in a dysfunctional educational system. Like the teachers I worked with, my frustrations and anger and hopelessness were real and justified. Things have been all fucked up and it just isn’t right.

But that doesn’t mean my pain class facilitators were wrong.

Seeing the parallels pretty quickly, I forced myself to do the kinds of things I wished more of my colleagues had been able to do with me. I made myself stick with the class. (I did skip one session, though.) I made myself keep trying new things. I made myself keep making and attending appointments and doing the things at home I’ve been advised to do. I read books and clicked links and watched videos. I made myself work to keep an open mind. I gave myself permission to be imperfect in all of this and take breaks when I just couldn’t with it all. And this week, I finally (I think, I hope) got to a doctor who was able to weave the many threads of my story with pain into a cohesive narrative. For the first time, ever.

And damn if those perky facilitators weren’t (for the most part) right. (Yay! And Fuuuuck!)

As is often the case with true stories, there is no black-and-white conflict, no easy cause-and-effect, no simple or neat resolution. There is much more “yes, and” than “either/or.” Yes, there are things I can do to improve my life with pain AND the pain has not been something in my control because it originates from my parasympathetic nervous system, which cannot be consciously controlled. Yes, it is, in a sense, “all in my head”–in that the pain originates in my brain–AND the pain is real, and felt in other parts of my body. Yes, the parts of my body that (now) hurt are structurally sound and disease-free, AND decades of living with a hyper-aroused nervous system have caused physical damage to some of those parts. (Also: In the past, some body systems were damaged, and that damage created pain, and that contributed to forming neural pathways that create pain now, even though I no longer have those organs that created the initial problem. It’s been tangly.) Yes, I lived and worked in broken systems for years that helped create these problems and that I was powerless to change, AND simply leaving those systems hasn’t made everything all better. (And won’t.) Yes, there’s finally a pathway to something better, AND going down it requires a lot of resources that aren’t available to a lot of people–which means that I probably couldn’t have done all that much to improve my situation in the years when I didn’t have them. And that we shouldn’t blame or shame those who don’t have what they need to be able to shift out of surviving a situation to improving it.

As was true for the teachers I worked with, there is no outside fix that will make everything all better and what I want it to be. There is no quick and easy solution, and certainly no perfect one. I cannot pick and choose the parts of a coping framework I can easily adopt and ignore other whole parts of it. If I do, I will get only partial benefits, if any. (Which is why so many of the things chronic pain sufferers been told to do over the years haven’t really worked for many of us.) Improving things will require me to adopt new paradigms and do things differently and it will take some time for me to see results. To stay on this path, I will need to abandon others, and there is some loss in that.

But I will tell you this: for the first time in years, I have hope that things can be significantly better. If you’ve ever lost hope and then regained it, you know what a gift it is.

Some years, I can hardly wait until December 26 to take the Christmas tree down. Not this one. My daughter’s husband flew in from Sweden with the ice storm on December 22, and for two weeks our little house was full of sugar and clutter and candlelight and puzzle pieces and music and comfort food and ease. It felt like a warm, slow-moving dream, and I didn’t want it to end, but finally, on Epiphany Eve, I began to put Christmas away.

I’d thought about waiting until Fredrik left to begin dismantling our holiday, but as the world moved on from New Year’s Day things started to feel differently. When Cane returned to school, it started to feel right to begin gathering up our beloved objects and putting them back in their boxes, a physical manifestation of our transition to a different way of being. I didn’t meet the traditional expectation and get everything taken down and put away on Epiphany Eve. In some cultures, that would mean that our decorations needed to then stay up until February 2–but I just can’t with that. I didn’t even finish the next day, Friday, though I made some progress. We were having such a nice one, our last full day with Fredrik. I didn’t want to lose the time we still had to preparing for the time to come.

I was deep in de-lighting the tree that afternoon when Cane’s daughter called to tell him that her cat needed to be put down. We knew it was coming–he was old and ill when she adopted him nearly three years ago–but it was still a blow. Cane would need to be with her the next day while Grace and I took Fredrik to the airport. It was to be a day of hard endings for our girls, and for us, too.

I finished putting Christmas away on Saturday, after our trip to the airport. Driving away from Fredrik and from Grace who was going to privately say goodbye to him there before getting herself to work, I counted three couples clinging to each other on the sidewalk in front of the departures doors, some wiping tears from their faces. I couldn’t stop my own from coming.

That night, Cane and I sat in front of a fire in our living room. Normally, I love the first evening after putting all the Christmas things away. The clean, open spaces feel good. Not this time. “It feels empty in here,” I said, even though we’d spent some of the afternoon talking about how we have too much furniture in the room. “I think this is the first year since I’ve known you that I didn’t say ‘fucking Christmas’ at least one time during the season,” I added. He laughed and agreed that it was.

I suppose that might be because it’s the first year in my adult life I found myself accepting the holidays as they came, able to be more grateful for what we have than sad for what we don’t. As Cane and I sipped wine and put wood on the fire, we talked about our family–the people we’ve lost (our grandparents, younger versions of our children and parents and selves) and the ones who remain. We talked about our fears for losses we know are coming.

“What I didn’t understand when I was younger,” I said, “is that everything and everyone is always dying. Every good-bye is a little death. The Fredrik who gets on the plane will not be the same one we see the next time we are all together in June. We won’t be the same.”

I know that sounds morbid, but I found it comforting, somehow. Time feels like an endless sea at the beginning of all our holidays, all our love stories; we float and play in it with nothing but delight because all we can see is water. We know there is a shore and that the waves are taking us relentlessly toward it, but it’s so far away. Until it isn’t. Eventually, always, the calendar turns. Something ends. Someone leaves or dies. The tree comes down. But that there are always endings means that there are always beginnings, new versions of us to fall in love with, new waters to dive into with joy.

As the fire burned down and we talked about all that we love and have loved, the room began to feel a little more full, and I began to make peace with the changes in it. Or maybe my eyes just began to get used to how it is now, as they always do. We’d planned to cook dinner at home, to make a good new memory in our favorite place, but we were both tired from the day and couldn’t bear the idea of cleaning up afterward. Instead, we went out for Chinese. “It’s still the holidays, right?” he said, and we laughed.

When we returned, the house felt a little more like home than it did when we’d left. And it was all right.

We were all right.

(Nope.)

Each New Year’s Eve, I wonder what the coming year will bring that I cannot anticipate, which prompts me to look back at the previous year and note those things that surprised me. In 2022, for example, these are developments I could not have predicted on December 31, 2021:

I returned to the ice.

I began a new, fundamentally different relationship with my body after an episode of severe back pain.

We bought a project house in Louisiana.

These are all huge things for me, and my life is significantly different from a year ago because of each of them. I will also wonder, too, about what things will happen in the world. On January 5, 2020, I wrote these words, reflecting on the death of someone important to me:

“We are living through a frightening, unstable time. Robert and I viewed many things differently, but we agreed about this. His death–or, more importantly, his life and his beliefs and his many words to me–have me thinking hard about what work needs to be done in the face of all that is coming.”

Ha! “…in the face of all that is coming.” I had no idea what was going to be coming in the months that followed: pandemic, schools closing, protests, wildfires that gave my city–for a week or so–the worst air quality in the world, a presidential election in which the loser (we now know for sure) tried to overthrow the results and was largely responsible for ending our long streak of peaceful transfers of power.

What will the coming year bring? Who knows! After the past few, I have lost any illusions I once had about being in control of what happens. And honestly, I am glad I don’t know. I’d rather deal with the hard things as they come; knowing about last year’s ahead of time would not have allowed me to prevent or mitigate any of them. As for the events I’ve deemed “good,” this last year gave me such lovely, wonderful surprises, and a big part of my delight was the unexpectedness of them.

Perhaps because of the way so many things have felt out of my control in recent years (in ways both good and bad), I’ve abandoned anything that looks like a traditional resolution, and I don’t choose a word for the year, and I don’t really even set intentions. I like to think that new ways of being are something I can invite in at any time (which is why I’m publishing a new year’s post after everyone else has moved on from that topic), and I’m more interested in small shifts than grand undertakings. So, these are two small shifts I’m making this month:

1. PT and yoga: I began physical therapy in the fall, but I haven’t made good progress with it. Despite the fact that it should only take me minutes a day, I’ve had a terrible time making time for it. Yoga is also something I’ve been wanting to start. I’ve signed up for a 30 day yoga series through Yoga with Adriene (recommended by the pain management clinic I started working with in October). I am only a few days in, but I’ve been starting my days with PT and yoga. Maybe I needed more of a time commitment, so that it wouldn’t be so easy to tell myself I’d do it later in the day? I’m not sure how it will work when skating starts up again (classes weren’t in session over the holidays), but my goal is to do PT/yoga on any days I’m not skating. (I’m giving myself permission in advance not to be perfect in my practice. I think that’s got to be a key to sticking with new things.)

2. Reading: Last year my daughter introduced me to an app called StoryGraph. I signed up for it, recorded one book, and promptly forgot about it. I’ve never been a GoodReads person; StoryGraph appeals to me (maybe?) because it’s small. Or it’s small the way I plan to use it. I’ve signed up for the January Pages Challenge, using both the audiobook I’m currently listening to (The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois) and the print book I’m reading (The Winners). I want a way to track my reading, and I want some accountability for myself. I like the visuals of this platform. I don’t know why I’ve been having trouble sustaining my attention with print books, but I’d like to work on changing that. I know the best way is simply to read more. Right now, I’m just raising my awareness of how much I’m reading and why I sometimes don’t pick up a book. If this is something you use or are interested in using, let’s be reading buddies; my username is ritamarie.

That’s it. These are two things I hope I can turn into new routines in my life, regardless of what the year brings. Challenging my body and my mind, cultivating good mental and physical health. I’m still plugging away at food issues (planning, preparation, low-inflammation options, developing workable routines), household organization, figuring out skating goals, and thinking about writing goals, but I’m not starting anything new with any of those things. I can only cultivate so many new habits at once, and these two seem pretty compatible with winter, with its slower pace.

I would love to know what you’re anticipating in the coming year, how you establish new habits, or if you have any book recommendations. Or maybe just chime in on what you want to be in 2023:

Sending wishes that all your surprises in the coming year will be good ones.